Cite as: 515 U. S. 900 (1995)
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
Georgia's Eleventh District, in sum, is not an outlier district shaped without reference to familiar districting techniques. Tellingly, the district that the Court's decision today unsettles is not among those on a statistically calculated list of the 28 most bizarre districts in the United States, a study prepared in the wake of our decision in Shaw. See Pildes & Niemi, 92 Mich. L. Rev., at 565.
C
The Court suggests that it was not Georgia's Legislature, but the U. S. Department of Justice, that effectively drew the lines, and that Department officers did so with nothing but race in mind. Yet the "Max-Black" plan advanced by the Attorney General was not the plan passed by the Georgia General Assembly.9 See 864 F. Supp., at 1396-1397, n. 5 (Edmondson, J., dissenting) ("The Max-Black plan did influence to some degree the shape of the ultimate Eleventh District . . . . [But] the actual Eleventh is not identical to the Max-Black plan. The Eleventh, to my eye, is significantly different in shape in many ways. These differences show . . . consideration of other matters beyond race . . . .").10
And although the Attorney General refused preclearance to the first two plans approved by Georgia's Legislature, the State was not thereby disarmed; Georgia could have demanded relief from the Department's objections by instituting a civil action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, with ultimate review in this Court. Instead of pursuing that avenue, the State chose to adopt the plan here in controversy—a plan the State forcefully defends
9 Appendixes A, B, and C to this opinion depict, respectively, the proposed Eleventh District under the "Max-Black" plan, Georgia's current congressional districts, and the district in controversy in Shaw.
10 Indeed, a "key" feature, ante, at 907, of the "Max-Black" plan—placing parts of Savannah in the Eleventh District—first figured in a proposal adopted by Georgia's Senate even before the Attorney General suggested this course. 864 F. Supp., at 1394, n. 1 (Edmondson, J., dissenting).
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